


The Camera Doesn't Lie

by TempleCloud



Category: James Bond - All Media Types, James Bond - Ian Fleming
Genre: Films, Gen, Period-Typical Homophobia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-13
Updated: 2020-12-13
Packaged: 2021-03-11 00:02:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,119
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28045869
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TempleCloud/pseuds/TempleCloud
Summary: James Bond is forced to preview film adaptations of his adventures.
Comments: 1
Kudos: 2





	The Camera Doesn't Lie

For a secret agent, work doesn’t stop just because you’re ill.

James Bond had _finally_ been released from hospital after his latest work-related injury, but not cleared for active service, nor for drinking or smoking. It was depressing to reflect that he had probably spent more of his life in hospital beds than in beds with beautiful women, what with all those months on a life-support machine after his encounter with a poison-tipped knitting-needle, not to mention that stint in a mental hospital after being brainwashed into trying to assassinate M. (Looking back, he wasn’t sure whether to be proud that some vestige of loyalty must have overridden his brainwashing and made him unable to go through with it, or embarrassed at ever having failed to kill someone.)

At any rate, M had made it clear that after his success in killing Scaramanga, he was more than forgiven for that earlier incident. Frustratingly, being forgiven meant that he was no longer allowed to pass straight from hospital into another ultra-perilous, death-or-glory-but-probably-death assignment. This time, he wasn’t even allowed to go on a soft assignment while convalescing, because the supposedly less dangerous assignments, like the ones he had been sent on after the poison-tipped knitting-needle or when he was grieving over Tracy’s death, had inevitably turned out to be much _more_ dangerous because he hadn’t been prepared for whatever lay ahead.

So, instead, he was stuck with office duty. Specifically, previewing the films based on his adventures to decide whether releasing them posed a security risk.

It was inevitable that there would _be_ films, he knew. The books by retired Agent Fleming had been topping the bestseller list for years. The Secret Service officially disapproved of them, and privately sent Fleming requests for misinformation to include in his books. It was well known that the KGB read them, and could therefore be misled into wasting hundreds of man-hours racking their brains to work out ‘But just _how_ are the British able to do such-and-such…?’ 

It was Bond’s job to preview the books, too, and he liked them, though they couldn’t hold a candle to Raymond Chandler’s novels, of course. He had even taken to reading Fleming’s other work, and had contributed a guest chapter to a travel book in which he felt that Fleming had been unduly negative about New York, with his own description of the best places to eat, shop and be entertained in New York, and why he hadn’t had the chance to do any of them because his day had been taken up with rushing around trying to find a rendezvous point to meet up with a fellow agent, something that _should_ have been tidily concluded in fifteen minutes.

The BBC could have made some quite decent radio plays of the books. The films, though, were another matter. They weren’t even useful for spreading misinformation, because the gadgets were so obviously outlandish that not even the most gullible Russian spy would believe that they actually existed.

Bond tried to suppress his irritation that all the actors playing his friend Felix Leiter had the full complement of limbs, regardless of when the story was set. At first, he wondered whether the film-makers assumed that a one-handed, one-legged man would be too crippled to be any use in a fight. After a while, he revised his opinion. They were just trying to simplify things for the audience by ensuring that only the bad guys were physically damaged or disfigured, like a cartoonist’s idea of a pirate. After all, Bond’s own prominent collection of scars weren’t in evidence in the films, either. 

Admittedly, in real life James Bond had come up against a remarkable assortment of gangsters and enemy agents with scars or missing body parts, but it wasn’t as if he could tell who was an enemy just by looking at them. His job would be much simpler if only that were true. The fact was that the world was full of brave, honourable men who had been wounded in the defence of their countries, mostly during two world wars (plus quite a few who had maimed themselves in adolescent stunts and _then_ gone on to become war heroes). Pretending that this wasn’t so was a grave insult.

It was just a security measure, he reminded himself. It was for the best that none of these actors looked remotely like the real Felix Leiter, supposedly retired on medical grounds, but in practice still on the CIA’s reserve lists whenever they had need of him.

And after all, there were some stereotypes that fiction just _had_ to observe. It was like the way that in Fleming’s fictionalised accounts of Bond’s adventures, anyone who was homosexual, asexual or impotent was a villain, unless they turned out to be heterosexual deep-down but to have been traumatised by a bad experience with the opposite sex. Bond, who had stayed with Fleming on his home on Jamaica, knew for a fact that several of Fleming’s raffish assortment of writer and actor friends were homosexual, and none the worse for that (even if they did tease Bond about being camper than any of them and still claiming to be heterosexual). But the furthest that Fleming could push the boundaries in print was to have his version of Bond point out that not everyone with a university degree (possibly, not even everyone educated at Cambridge) was homosexual. Adding that not all homosexuals were in the pay of the KGB would have been far too controversial.

Besides, there was so much else to object to in the films, like the dialogue. Bond wasn’t under any illusion that he was a nice person. He was an assassin, a cold-blooded killer. But at least he wasn’t the sort of psychopath who went round killing people and then making _jokes_ about it!

Well, not _very_ psychopathic, anyway. The last psychiatrist M had called in to draw up psychological profiles of the staff had said that Bond scored above average on most of the main sociopathic traits, but he had said that about everyone else, too. M had concluded that psychiatrists just don’t understand spies, and the psychiatrist had gone on a long sabbatical to recover because his experience of the Secret Service was giving him nightmares.

What finally frayed his patience to snapping point was the names. All right, he’d met a few people with silly or suggestive names – ‘Pussy Galore’ was just a _nom de guerre_ , but he really did have a secretary called Mary Goodnight. But the films were just taking it beyond reasonable suspension of disbelief.

‘No, dammit!’ he exploded, snapping the film projector off. ‘I absolutely refuse to believe in an actor called _Roger Moore!_ ’


End file.
